Brett Anderson

January 22nd 2009

The last time I saw Brett Anderson he was fronting Suede on the Coming Up tour.  He swaggered on stage joining his band (everyone dressed in black) and delivered a set of songs which rode the crest of the Britpop wave which he had helped to kickstart. He pranced, he clapped, he put his foot on the monitor and sang songs about sex and drugs and the urban, working class world he inhabited.

Since then a lot of water has passed under his bridge; drug addiction, the break up of his band, death and the release of three solo albums in as many years, generally to critical and commercial indifference.  His solo output has been a much more sombre affair than the majority of Suede’s, preoccupied by death and broken relationships and on his latest LP, Slow Attack, the terrible beauty of nature. With this in mind I’d expected a much downbeat Anderson.  Although not quite as lively as 15 years ago, after sauntering onstage dressed in his trademark funeral apparel to join his band (piano, cello, guitar, bass, drums) his fringe flops, his hip sway and his tambourine shakes once more.

Opener ‘Hymn’  is breathtaking, Brett croons over minimal piano. When the band join in for the bass heavy crashing swells of the chorus the sound is immense, like waves crashing on a lonely beach. Two of the more pop songs from Slow Attack follow, (‘Wheatfields’ and ‘Hunted’) which are nice but don’t have the same impact as the opener, if anything they sound a little MOR.

With ‘Frozen Roads’ and ‘Leave me Sleeping’ he returns to a more poetic, abstract style. On the latter, a moving piano ballad, he dreams of being a child again, reunited with his now dead mother.  For those only familiar with his former band’s radio hits the emotional starkness of these songs might come as a surprise but there were many of these dark ballads lying in wait on Suede’s B sides and album tracks (‘The 2 of Us’, ‘The Living Dead’)  which had more in common with Nick Cave or Tindersticks than with their Britpop contemporaries and it’s a style Brett has increasingly pursued with his solo records.

The set continues with songs from Slow Attack, the band making up for the absence of the woodwind section which appears on most of the album by rocking them up a little, particularly on ‘The Ashes of Us’, where the guitarist gives us a Bernard Butler-style guitar workout.

We’re 10 songs in before any songs from Mr Anderson’s first two albums get an airing.  The band leave the stage and Brett delivers a solo rendition of ‘Clowns’ on acoustic guitar after which he quips “don’t worry, that’s the last time I’ll pick up an instrument tonight, I’ll leave it to the people who can really play.” Although more than competent as a guitarist, Brett clearly views himself as a singer and understands the emotive force that a vocal can have. Tonight his voice is in fine fettle with his singing style closer to the ballads on Dog Man Star than the camp, Bowie-esque screech found elsewhere in the Suede back catalogue.

With ‘Funeral Mantra’  Brett’s lyrics are at their darkest. “We kneel before the open grave and light the candles with our pain” is a million miles away from the Britpop party, and is the kind of song Nick Cave might write on a rainy day.

‘Love is Dead’, a mix of Morrissey and Suede’s ‘Stay Together’ illustrates why many critics panned his first record; it’s essentially a less inspired retread of his work with Suede and The Tears.

‘Song For My Father’ and an encore of ‘Back To You’ wind up the set and as the musicians leave the stage and the audience drift away into the rainy night it seems that Brett Anderson is enjoying a new freedom away from the glare of public expectation and Radio 1 playlists. This exile seems to have enabled him to more fully explore the darker subject matter which he touched on in his earlier work, writing in a way he hasn’t for years. Although onstage he may come across as being more at ease than ever, Brett Anderson is clearly a man beguiled by the dark side of life.

Blur at Hyde Park

In the final few weeks of 2008, something unexpected happened. Yes, it had been mooted and thrown around as a rumour for quite some time, but nobody was really sure if it would ever actually come about. Then it did: with sepia-toned photographs of Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon, entwined and grinning, splashed across an NME feature, Blur reformed.

Maybe it wasn’t such an amazing feat after all; Take That and the Spice Girls had set the trend, and Blur’s bassist Alex James had strongly hinted that a reunion was on the cards. It still felt incredibly special though, especially after Coxon and Albarn’s major success with their solo interests had seemed to take them in very different directions. While Coxon veered from the punk-inspired riffage of his 2004-era solo work towards a Nick Drake-style folk in 2009, Albarn built on the foundations of his work as an ethnomusicologist in Africa, developed the innovative Gorillaz project and teamed up with legendary musicians for The Good The Bad & The Queen (2007). Just how would the men behind ‘Parklife’ and ‘Country House’ find a way to meet back in the middle?

On a personal note, Blur were the first “proper” band that mattered to me. Like most 10-year-old girls in 1996, I was enthralled by The Spice Girls but hit a sort of zenith when I belatedly discovered Blur by way of Parklife (1994). Its catchy pop hooks are a draw for anyone who’s a sucker for a good tune but it was the quirks that really grabbed my attention: the stand-alone melancholy of the brass intro to ‘Badhead’, the hypnotic bass drum beats in ‘Girls and Boys’ and the squeal of computer games in ‘Jubilee’. Blur grabbed me in a way that other guitar groups never quite did and there the love affair began, never to be put asunder; a few years ago I wrote my university dissertation on Albarn’s work with Gorillaz, much to the chagrin of my Handel-loving lecturers.

Technically, Blur never split up; like childhood sweethearts, they simply grew apart. It’s easy to see how Coxon became disillusioned with Blur’s new direction on the ever cathartic 13 (1999), especially considering that the previous record Blur (1997) was widely hailed as “Graham’s album” thanks to its rockier and fuzzier presentation.

The central spectacle was soon revealed: a homecoming gig in London’s Hyde Park and their first live show for six years. Those of us who waited with baited breath and hovering cursors for the presale tickets thought we were going to be the lucky few who witnessed the reformation (give or take 50,000 others). Then a glut of other gigs trickled into being: a second Hyde Park date, a small nationwide tour and headline slots at Glastonbury and T in The Park. Were Blur going to end up diluting the effect or punching home the meaning?

I should have been rapturous, having won the chance to see my favourite band with a full roll call (at Leeds Festival 2003 they played without Coxon). Yet instead of being excited beyond belief I got a weird feeling about the whole thing. Coxon told The Sun that he wanted to play songs from Think Tank, even though he originally abandoned the recording sessions for this album partway through as he disagreed with the direction that the music was taking. A second greatest hits album, Midlife, was announced, featuring the uber-rare ‘Popscene’ which had never before been released on an album. These small things just rankled with me, as well as contradicting the things that I held most dear about Blur; in particular their strong sense of independence for such a big band, as well as their tendency to avoid the obvious.

Having somehow managed to shy away from the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage, as well as friends’ reviews and videos of the exclusive Goldsmiths’ College and Rough Trade East shows, I went into Friday’s Hyde Park event with a fresh mind. However, I knew that I wanted new material, the weird and the wonderful. I didn’t really want to hear the pompous brass of the slightly cringeworthy ‘Country House’, a song that the band used to make obvious they hated; not even the lacklustre and predictable ‘Song 2’, not anymore. The ‘greatest hits’ set is, of course what we got. Glimmers of the Blur I love shone through in moments like Modern Life Is Rubbish (1992)’s shimmery buzz track ‘Oily Water’, Blur’s ‘Death Of A Party’ and the super-cool ‘Trimm Trabb’, one of the more experimental tracks on 13. The latter is a song that Coxon allegedly disliked but one that he finished at Hyde Park lying on his back, strumming wildly, face scrunched tight. It just seemed a bit too contrived.

The ballads (‘The Universal’, ‘To The End’, ‘Badhead’) were typically beautiful and highlighted the sweet side of Blur that often gets forgotten behind the ‘Parklife’s and the ‘Girls and Boys’s. ‘Beetlebum’ and ‘For Tomorrow’ were spot on, both era-defining and showcasing Blur’s inherent variety. There is no doubting it was a great show but all too often the day felt overly clichéd. Of course, the vast majority of the crowd happily handed over their £50 awaiting an array of classics, but I’d been hoping for something more. When, in the middle of ‘Out Of Time’, the guy behind me said, “Well, they’re no Oasis, are they?” I felt like I was in the wrong place. Seeing a slim Alex James with white T-shirt and perfectly floppy fringe gnawing on a cigarette, looking like he’d just stepped out of a time machine, just underlined the oddity of the whole event.

This unexpected sense of unease only served to be exacerbated by flashing signs on the stage, highlighting that recordings of tonight’s set were now on sale (the final chord of ‘The Universal’ was still ringing). Blur’s Hyde Park got them rave reviews but from a band I’d always classed as innovators, who pushed boundaries without often realising it, it’s disappointing to say that they played the big easy hand.

Coxon hinted to NME earlier this year that “there could be more to come” from Blur, keeping in line with the band’s uniform ‘never say never’ attitude. I hope this is true, as little would please me more than a new Blur record. Nothing was given away at Hyde Park and it’s boggling to consider the roads they could head down now, given all that has passed since Coxon’s estrangement. Albarn’s foray into the realm of digital music with Gorillaz blurred the line between fiction and reality, as animated cartoons performed live with real musicians. His penchant for characterisation with both Blur and Gorillaz acted as a screen for Albarn, whose struggle with celebrity and fame was well-documented.

Don’t get me wrong – it was fabulous to hear some of my favourite songs played live again. It’s just that, after what had gone before, I was hoping for a little more from the second coming and, to me, it failed to properly deliver.

Blur

June 26, 2009

After a series of intimate gigs chosen for the nostalgic weight of their locations, Blur make the step-up to the MEN Arena tonight, prior to heading off to Glastonbury and London. After a prematurely-dated Klaxons set bereft of any new material whatsoever, the four-piece begin their show as they began their career back in 1990, with the dreamy if naïve ‘She’s So High’, an unremarkable baggy homage which then betrayed little of the invention to come over the next decade.

Instantly following with ‘Girls and Boys’, the track which arguably kicked the Britpop movement into fifth gear, it’s a hits-heavy set, with scant room for obscurity – although the devastating ‘Trimm Trabb’ and immensely funky ‘Oily Water’ (part of three consecutive choices from the underrated Modern Life Is Rubbish) are amongst the less well-known highlights.

The setlist is conservative yet effective, with many tracks grouped together according to their particular era; it’s more single-led than the recent compilation would have us believe. Predictably, the crowd reserve their most ecstatic levels of enthusiasm for yob-rock staples such as the hollow ‘Country House’ (preceded by a rather ambiguous observation/analogy on the death of Michael Jackson) and a breakneck run through ‘Parklife’ with special guest Phil Daniels intact. Other than an overlong rendition of the arguably plodding ‘Tender’, it’s a tight, thrilling show. Constantly goosebump-inducing, to see Graham Coxon finally completing the jigsaw and adding spine-tingling melancholia to a previously Coxon-free ‘Out of Time’ is pretty special. Blur roly-poly through ‘Popscene’, delivered as if they’re the ferocious twenty-somethings of yesteryear.

Closing with the immense warmth of ‘For Tomorrow’, and ‘The Universal’ – a track now impossible to disassociate from British Gas marketing campaigns – it remains to be seen what their plans are after these summer dates. It seems somehow strange to see Damon Albarn intoxicated on verse-chorus-verse indie nostalgia after the massive eclecticism of his numerous side projects, but if they were to carry on where they left off at the start of the decade, a new album would be more than welcome.

The public anticipation (or great relief) directed towards the reunion reminds us that not one single chart-bothering band has emerged with one iota of the timelessness, natural giftedness, invention, wit and poignancy of Albarn‘s combo during the largely piss-weak, polished, diluted, shallow, backwards and scenester-friendly 2000s UK guitar scene.

It has also been pleasing to note the instantaneous vanishing of the Kaiser Chiefs since the announcement of these gigs.

Blur's Alex James - image by ex zilla

June 22, 2009

I’d liked to have started this review off by going on about how special it was to be arriving at such a small venue, littered with reminders of what university life was like and painfully similar to the school halls of my childhood. This sentimental feel was very much in keeping with what Blur’s music has meant to me, personally, over the years. I think I aged a good five years when my big sister handed me a copy of Leisure when I was ten years-old, while I vividly remember dragging my mum on a bus ride to Our Price in Islington the day The Great Escape came out.

The trouble is, David Walliams – a mountain of a man, I might add – was lurking around the entrance hall as we arrived. This symbol of British popular culture in the “noughties” was a stark reminder that this was no ordinary trip down memory lane for that small ginger kid bopping to ‘There’s No Other Way’ in his bedroom, wondering how that guitar made all those sounds. This was a real event. What was once my own small secret was now… oh, and there’s Jude Law.

When the band saunter on just a few minutes after their promise of eight o’clock, and swagger into the opening number from their 1991 debut LP, the crowd sway and groove, all the while mindfully transfixed on the figure stood in the middle of the stage. His eyes locked on the ceiling above him, Damon Albarn looks like a man praying to the Goldsmiths Gods, a lead singer watching nigh on twenty years of his life roll by and culminate in the right here, right now.

For a minute it looks as though he won’t be snapping out of it anytime soon. But then he does, strolling to the microphone and sending everybody present back to the moment they originally fell in love with his band. ‘Girls And Boys’ quickly follows, resulting in an impromptu contest aiming to find out who can pogo the highest, while Damon is up to his old tricks, getting up close and personal with his audience. He’s like a jumped up so-and-so at a football match and it’s bloody brilliant to see again.

“Where have you been?” somebody yells out between songs. “Heh. Where’ve we been?” Damon responds, the collar of his Fred Perry polo shirt suddenly seeming a little tighter. “Well, we were in Southend last night!” The lack of sentiment in the response was just what the question needed; Mr. Albarn is a man clearly proud of his post-Blur work and one can’t help but feel, judging by this showing, the time off was certainly a blessing for band and fans alike.

With glasses slipping down his nose at an alarming rate, Graham Coxon is conjuring up his bedazzling noises and still boggling the mind. And while ‘Tender’ provides a reason to gush at his and Damon’s presence on stage together, it is ‘Beetlebum’s back-end, lifted to headier heights than ever through sheer musical determination, that really ploughs its way through hearts and minds. There’s some sound provided by this pokey student union and Blur are certainly getting the most out of it.

Looking up to see a slim Alex James blow away his cheese-eating, farmyard-wandering persona with a slinky monitor-mounting pose and Dave Rowntree (for Prime Minister) keeping it all together like a designated driver sure is a sight to behold. But closing your eyes and letting the sound wash over you was where it’s really at in New Cross. And while you aren’t doing that you’re having one of around sixty bottles of water chucked over your face by Damon; it really is too hot, but we’re all too young to care.

Once ‘The Universal’ brings the house down and the lights come up, there’s a sense that what just happened was all a dream. Two hours of what is likely the best set I’ve ever heard at a gig has left the shiny walls eerily dripping with sweat. It’s surprisingly quiet too. I’m back in 1995, leaving that record store on a school night, already excited about rushing in early to tell my friends about it all the next day.

Blur

Following their comeback show on Saturday, Graham Coxon exclusively revealed via his Twitter page that Blur are playing a London show tonight (Monday June 15).

Wristbands are available to the first 170 people to turn up at Brixton Academy NOW so get your skates on. The show will not be taking place there, and the current rumours suggest that it will be at Rough Trade East. It’ll be a scorcher…

UPDATE: It is NOT happening at Rough Trade. We have been told this via official e-mail. If you know where it is, reveal all to the world now!

Jarvis - Further Complications

It’s just not a very conceivable story, is it? This man playing basically the whole 1980s in an unsuccessful band, being on the dole to boot.

Then, when his band finally is on the up, a fight with the record label pushes their album right out of any picture it was possibly in. That this lanky fellow, of all, becomes a Britpop sex symbol is just bizarre. Now Jarvis Cocker has grown a beard, but he still is the same unlikely hero that he was then, only now with two solo efforts to his name. This second effort is entitled Further Complications, and as sketched above, his life has been quite complicated enough already, and he has probably earned the right to do whatever he wants. Even if that means teaming up with Steve Albini, who was on no one’s list as a Jarvis producer.

Albini, namely, is a rocker, not essentially the main quality you would associate with Jarvis. Then again, he does come storming out of the gates with the title track. At one point Jarvis is genuinely just screaming, how about that for an Albini influence? The song is followed by ‘Angela’, arguably the most straight-forward and one of the least impressive songs, and henceforth promoted as a single. If those two songs are quite a bit of rock, in comes ‘Pilchard’, which is a mostly instrumental song really not seen from Jarvis since ‘Styloroc (Nites of Suburbia)’ on the Gift Recordings. Another instrumental surprise will come when ‘Homewrecker’ starts with Pulp man Steve Mackey playing a nifty bit of sax (he played on The Stooges ‘Funhouse’ you know).

After that ballad you get three songs that are perhaps straining it a bit. Especially ‘Fuckingsong’ and ‘Caucasian Blues’, while not bad songs per se, tilt the album perhaps too much to the rock side after having witnessed quite the diversity. ‘You’re In My Eyes (Discosong)’ closes the album in an epic, almost nine minute take on what is reminiscent of the ‘Rolling Down The Hills’ song by Glass Candy. Jarvis injects so much melancholy in the disco, as well as a bit of meta-fiction (“And I don’t want this song to ever end/because I know if it did, you would disappear again”), that this might just be the best song on the entire album.

Even though the album was recorded in America, the Englishness of it shines through on many occasions. Self-depreciation is present especially in ‘Leftovers’, but you can also find irony, sustained absurdism, and things knowingly nonsense on the album. Also rooted in Jarvis are those dole years in Sheffield, churning out some deliciously working class lines like “I want to refrigerate this moment” on ‘Slush’ (because really, can you imagine Judi Dench saying something like that about her leftovers?).

Not all that surprisingly, Jarvis has made a record different from any of his previous works. His last effort was more a storytelling journey, and Further Complications as a whole is far removed from either the house/disco of Separations, the Britpop years, or the last two Pulp albums (for the sake of the man’s legacy we’ll just stay silent about his first two Pulp records). Jarvis is at the top of his game here, whether it is singing-wise or as a lyricist. True, ‘Angela’ is not a cracking single, and at a certain point you might start to get a tad weary of the rocky edge of some songs. At that moment though, that disco song starts, which lures you back in remembering what you were already thinking in the first place: that this album is made by an artist of considerable talent, and one who has enough gas left in the tank for people to already wonder in anticipation what the man is going to do next.

Kenickie - At The Club

So it’s early 1997. Oasis are a matter of months away from strapping Britpop to their motorbike and heaving its tired carcass over the metaphorical shark. Blur have already evolved their way out of the scene by indulging their Pavement fantasies on their eponymous classic. And Kenickie, with characteristically disastrous timing are about to unleash their debut album At The Club.

But we’ll disregard the inopportune timing of Lauren Laverne‘s merry gang for now and concentrate on one of the best guitar pop records of the ’90s. Like 1977, which was released a year previously, At The Club is an album that could only have been made by teenagers. From start to finish, it’s a blast of pure youthful energy. It kicks off with ‘In Your Car’, an explosive precursor of things to come. What follows is a mix of shouty harmonies, playful pop fun, and smart-arsed soundbites.

The album calls to mind a lot of the best bands of the ’90s. For example, the squelchy synths on ‘Robot Song’ are reminiscent of the first Mansun record. What’s kept At The Club fresh in the 12 years since it’s release is the fact that Kenickie weren’t just magpies; they took the classics and put their unique Northern punk stamp on them. I mean, look at ‘PVC’. It’s Nirvana’s ‘Lithium’ in pigtails (which kind of explains why Courtney Love had a soft spot for Kenickie).

And then there’s Lauren Laverne’s lyrics, which aren’t a million miles away from Suede’s romanticising of trash life: “We dress cheap, we dress tacky”, “We’re on our backs looking up at the stars”. All this, and we haven’t even mentioned ‘Punka’, Kenickie’s undoubted high point. In fact, screw it, it’s most bands’ high point. A joyous, glitzy three minutes of complete ecstasy on the subject of punk puritanism, it satirises and glamorises all at once.

The album finishes off on a downbeat note. The stripped down ‘Acetone’ dispenses with the power chords and attitude for a surprisingly gorgeous tale of trying to “dodge the sick stains on the street”. Well, I say the album finishes there, but it doesn’t quite. Where Ash chose to end their debut album with a revolting recording of them throwing up, Kenickie show they are clearly a far more demure bunch. They finish matters with the comic japery of ‘Montrose Gimps it up for Charity’. The song is basically just a load of kids larking about in the studio having a right old laugh at each other, and is about the most appropriate conclusion to the album really.

With At The Club, Kenickie gave us one of indie’s great under-rated albums. Predictably, they ended up burning out within 18 months of its release. They managed just one more record, Get In, which was a far more laid-back affair which sold far fewer copies than it deserved. In reality though, there probably was anything they could do to save them from an unsympathetic record-buying public which, lest we forget, was just about to embrace the horrors of nu-metal.

This was the way Kenickie was always going to end, and was a far more fitting way to finish that limping to an insipid third, fourth and fifth record like a lot of their contemporaries did.

Blur

As a warm-up for their massive, huge, gigantic, showstopping shows, Blur have announceD a duo of intimate club shows to raise money for charidee.

These fan club only dates were announce this morning at blur.co.uk, and will come before the band’s appearances at Hyde Park, the MEN Arena, Oxegen, T In The Park and Glastonbury.

On June 13, they will be making a return to the East Anglian Railway Museum, the venue of their first ever gig. The proceeds will go to the Aldham Village Hall Restoration Project and the museum itself.

And they will also be playing London’s Goldsmith College on June 22, with proceeds going to the Teenage Cancer Trust.

The Bluetones - Expecting To Fly

There’s a heavy weight bearing down on bands when it comes to naming début albums.

It could make people pick up or turn away – it could make the difference between a lasting career or a brief day basking in the warming sun of musical success.

The Bluetones’ 1996 début was named Expecting To Fly, which spoke more volumes about the band than they could have with their music.

It was a record that tied up their fearful ‘dare to hope’ attitude with a small amount of self-assurance, well-placed in their understanding that they had talent, dammit, and people would see that.

And they did, for a time. Expecting To Fly fired Oasis’ (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? from the number one spot, which was a grand measure of popularity indeed.

Now, 13 years later, The Bluetones are out on the road again and a new revamped version of this Britpop classic has been unleashed.  So, is it a must-have for the diehards, a might-have for the newbies? Or essential listening straight outta Hounslow?

From the initial bass rumble, opener ‘Talking To Clarry’ is a leader. giving way to confidently crashing indie guitars, it was clear that The Bluetones were going to be smarter than the average indie band.

And smart they were, nodding to Brit poet Adrian Mitchell and his poem Celia, Celia with the memorable lyric from single ‘Bluetonic’ – “When I am sad and weary/When all my hope has gone/I walk around my house and think of you with nothing on”.

A lovely dark slice of infatuation, it retains its uniquely minor-key misery even now, perhaps thanks to singer Mark Morriss‘ easily-recognisable, uniquely tremulous vocal.

In the old days, ‘Carnt Be Trusted’ was the first track on the second side of the Expecting To Fly cassette.

Now, it still forms a change of pace in the record. A lovely, melodic ode to the pitfalls of relationships, it boasts delicious harmonies that would make Brian Wilson blush, and does the business in under four minutes. That’s proper songwriting.

Closing on ‘Time And Again’, it stays with the band long enough to exhibit a darkly sweet menace that says, “We could never really hurt you – but we might shake our fists a bit”.

The new material which adds to this expanded edition includes a whole other disc of Bluetones paraphernalia like previously unreleased live tracks and BBC archive material.

Aside from the inclusion of the undisputed single of 1995, (‘Are You Blue Or Are You Blind?’, in case you’ve forgotten), it doesn’t do a terrible amount of new stuff, more augmenting the glory of the original album release, but that’s worth it just to get Expecting To Fly back on the shelves again.

Ejaculated by a genre which had already sounded its death rattle with the likes of Menswe@r and Heavy Stereo, The Bluetones were unfortunately timed. Were Expecting To Fly released anew in 2009, there is no doubt that its vast landscapes of melodious melancholy would rocket, and Mark Morriss would be smiling his ever-enigmatic smirk across the music channels.

As it is, this LP signifies a fantastically well-presented selection of incredibly intelligent, heartfelt songs for which 1996 should always be remembered – that ‘daring to hope’ frozen in time.

Mark Morriss - Sick

Remember when Britannia ruled

and everyone wanted to be photographed in 10 Downing Street?

When the Prime Minister had a history of being in bands and there was a reason to be cheerful in our green and pleasant land? Mark Morriss does.  

With all the fervent desire of a smack addict, Morriss dearly clings to the Britpop scene of which his former band The Bluetones were shining lights, a musical landscape at the fag-end of the 1990s so innocuous in its presence that it gave us little more than lacklustre legend and rock apocrypha concerning Blur and Oasis.

 

More than 10 years on, Morriss is still at it with more musical offerings. Last year’s Memory Muscle album masterminded with old hand David Arnold yielded much in the way of nostalgia – any former Britpopper worth their salt will still be moved to near-tears when the Hounslow boy’s plaintive indie-bleat peals out of the speakers – but little in the way of musical clarity.

‘I’m Sick’ does have more than a whiff of The ‘Tones about it, but the indie strumming is soon eclipsed by a seemingly-incongruous mariachi trumpet.

It’s unclear as to what form the titular sickness is taking, but with the line, “I’m sick and I want to get well again… I’m adrift, I’m my own worst enemy” it would be naive not to question if the sickness here is an incredible hankering for past… ahem… ‘glories’.

This, sadly, is a very slight return.